Genentech Hall is the centerpiece of the UCSF Mission Bay campus. It opened its doors 10 years ago, when many of the research scientists working at the school's Parnassus campus were reluctant to move.

Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle

Genentech Hall is the centerpiece of the UCSF Mission Bay campus....

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The William J. Rutter Center is reflected in the windows of 10-year-old Genentech Hall on the UCSF campus.

Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle

The William J. Rutter Center is reflected in the windows of...

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The William J. Rutter Center is among buildings that have sprouted up around the campus since Genentech Hall opened.

Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle

The William J. Rutter Center is among buildings that have sprouted...

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Keith Yamamoto, a molecular biologist: "There was really nothing" there when he moved to Mission Bay in 2003.

Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle

Keith Yamamoto, a molecular biologist: "There was really nothing"...

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Professor Charles Craik (left) is the first person to move into Genentech Hall during its opening in 2003.

Photo: Kurt Rogers, SFC

Professor Charles Craik (left) is the first person to move into...

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Wood benches and native grasses fill a plaza in front of the cardiovascular research center at the UCSF Mission Bay campus in San Francisco.

Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle

Wood benches and native grasses fill a plaza in front of the...

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The UCSF Mission Bay Medical Center won't open until early 2015, but the parking garage that will serve it is already complete -- and the design by WRNS Studio treats the structure as a sculpture on the landscape while also making it comfortable for people on their way to and from their cars.

Photo: Tim Griffith

The UCSF Mission Bay Medical Center won't open until early 2015,...

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Assessor Phil Ting speaks outside of Genentech Hall at the UCSF Mission Bay campus in San Francisco, Calif. on Friday, Aug. 24, 2012. Ting released new data that shows the Mission Bay neighborhood has one of the city's fastest growing real estate values.

Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle

Assessor Phil Ting speaks outside of Genentech Hall at the UCSF...

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A neighbor walks her dog along Mission Creek while construction continues on the UCSF Mission Bay campus (background) in San Francisco in 2009.

Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle

A neighbor walks her dog along Mission Creek while construction...

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Outdoor sculpture by Richard Serra is shown at UCSF Mission Bay.

Photo: David Paul Morris, The Chronicle

Outdoor sculpture by Richard Serra is shown at UCSF Mission Bay.

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In this file photo, Tom Henderson, 4, of San Francisco runs through the grass at Koret Quad at UCSF in the Mission Bay.

Photo: Mike Kepka, The Chronicle

In this file photo, Tom Henderson, 4, of San Francisco runs through...

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The Community Center building on campus at UCSF Mission Bay.

Photo: MIKE KANE

The Community Center building on campus at UCSF Mission Bay.

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UCSF student housing is one of the more occupied areas of Mission Bay.

Photo: Lance Iversen, The Chronicle

UCSF student housing is one of the more occupied areas of Mission Bay.

When Keith Yamamoto moved into his fifth-floor office at UCSF's Mission Bay campus a decade ago, he felt like a pioneer - and maybe, just a little, like a pariah.

Several of his colleagues had told Yamamoto, who was helping plan the new campus, that they would refuse to ever work there. Mission Bay at the time was a "wasteland," he said.

"There was really nothing," said Yamamoto, a molecular biologist and executive vice dean of the UCSF School of Medicine. "There was no campus. Just a building and a shuttle bus. And some ambitious plans."

A decade later, those plans have largely been realized. Mission Bay is still a work in progress, but what was once a dusty outpost is now a sunny, vibrant hub of medical research.

On Wednesday, UCSF will celebrate the 10th anniversary of the opening of Genentech Hall, the first building to rise at Mission Bay. A dozen buildings are now scattered around the campus, with more to come, including a hospital in two years.

Mission Bay, once a dead industrial site on the edge of San Francisco Bay, is home to not just UCSF but also the independent Gladstone Institutes and several startup companies. Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer has set up a lab.

Searching for cures

The emphasis at Mission Bay is on research, and scientists there are studying the basic mechanisms behind Alzheimer's disease and HIV, heart conditions and cancer. They're hunting for molecules that may someday be made into drugs to fight aging.

The goal is ultimately to build up Mission Bay to 4 million square feet of lab and office space - a little less than half of that is filled now.

While the bulk of the work is basic research, there are clinical components now, including outpatient centers for heart disease and sports medicine.

There's also a community gym with a rooftop pool offering sweeping views of the San Francisco skyline, and several meeting halls for conferences among scientists and for the public in general. There are living quarters too, for students and faculty.

In all, about 3,400 people live and work at Mission Bay, and the campus still has at least another decade of growth before it's filled out completely, say the faculty and administrators who were involved in the initial planning.

"We still need some more restaurants," said Tejal Desai, a bioengineer trying to improve techniques for drug delivery.

Nonetheless, the appeal of Mission Bay - a modern campus being built from scratch, focused on interdisciplinary research - was enough to draw Desai back to UCSF in 2005, several years after she'd earned her doctorate in bio-engineering there.

A diverse team

Desai and her team have been building nano-devices that can be transplanted into the eye to deliver drugs to treat macular degeneration, or that can be swallowed and attached to the intestines to release drugs there. On her scientific team are chemists and biologists and an assortment of engineers - a widely varied lot compared with the engineering departments she'd grown up in academically.

"Mission Bay was a very different environment than what I was used to. I was really excited by what they were trying to create here," Desai said. "It's been amazing to see this campus emerge, and a really vibrant entrepreneurial community built around it."

So vibrant, in fact, that these days scientists sometimes find themselves defending UCSF's classic site at Parnassus Heights against suggestions that it's been overshadowed by its sister campus.That's quite the turnaround in a decade's time. In 2003, Yamamoto's colleagues weren't the only ones reluctant to move to the flatlands, where they feared they'd be out of sight and mind.

Unlike many of his peers, Charles Craik was eager to move. At Parnassus, he was stuck with a cramped lab and a broom closet for an office, and the promise of creating his own new space in Genentech Hall was hard to resist.

"We were all crammed in at Parnassus. For a while that was a good thing, but there's a point where it's too crowded," he said.

Craik was part of a team of scientists that identified a protease enzyme associated with HIV that turned out to be a target for drugs to fight the virus. Since moving to Mission Bay, Craik has branched out, looking for proteases that could be targets for treating cancer or infections other than HIV.

A synergy at work

Craik is a chemist by training, but he works with scientists across a wide swath of other sciences, and while he said it can sometimes be intimidating to step outside his field of expertise, it's exhilarating, too.

"There's a synergy that occurs here that's greater than the individual parts. We're all constantly bumping into one another," he said. "You're constantly having to stay on your toes and reinvent yourself. But it is a very supportive environment."

Craik and Desai both said they've taken advantage of the entrepreneurial opportunities at Mission Bay, if only to have conversations with industry experts about how they might eventually get a treatment through the federal approval process and into patients.

A widely publicized cornerstone of Mission Bay is UCSF's QB3, the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences, a business incubator that bridges the academic and private sectors. QB3 is designed to give startups the space and access to high-tech equipment to get off the ground safely.

The technology isn't just for the entrepreneurs. Scientists such as Cynthia Kenyon, a specialist in aging who is best known for her work studying longevity in worms, have come to rely on the access to equipment that is often available only to people who are actively making drugs to treat human diseases.

Shortly after she moved from Parnassus to Mission Bay in 2003, Kenyon began using QB3's "small molecule discovery center," which includes equipment to screen for molecules that could eventually be made into drugs. In Kenyon's case, she was looking for molecules that were unique to cells from long-lived species.

"We already knew that there were certain properties that cells from longer-lived organismshave that set them apart," Kenyon said. "What we'll do with the molecules we find is put them into various disease settings, in human cells.

"It's really thrilling," she said. "And it's really, really fun."

A wind-swept prairie

Kenyon said she misses Parnassus sometimes, if only because many of her long-favored colleagues still work up there. And there was an energy to the crowded labs and halls that can't quite be re-created in the open spaces at Mission Bay.

But the weather is nicer where she is now, she said.

"When we first got here, Mission Bay, it was kind of like standing on the prairie," Kenyon said. "It had this wild air and this saltwater smell."

"Initially there was this idea that Mission Bay was a wasteland, and people didn't want to go," she said. "Then there was kind of a social switch. They'd put some really great scientists down there, and people didn't want to be left behind. And suddenly, it became cool to be here."